Cliff Moon is a builder of and frequent speaker on high-performance, scalable web applications. Cliff is the lead engineer for front-end systems at Powerset where he was instrumental in the design, implementation, launch, and operation of many of the company's production services. Cliff is an active contributor to open source projects, and is a highly-regarded member of the Erlang community. He was inspired by the publication of the Amazon Dynamo paper to implement, and release as open source, Dynomite, a robust, distributed key/value store written in Erlang, currently in production use at Powerset.

While it is not a fast language, for many purposes Erlang is considered "fast enough". But what happens when "fast enough" isn't fast enough? You don't have to rewrite your whole project in C or C++. This talk will cover the exercise of profiling an Erlang application. You will learn how to replace critical code sections with C functions using the new NIF (Native Implemented Function) interface. You will learn how to integrate a native 3rd party library using the linked in driver interface. And finally you will learn how to protect C drivers from race conditions in Erlang's highly concurrent environment and how to debug them in a running Erlang VM.